lauren/cloudessence, 28, tme black nonbinary bisexy (they/them ONLY) hiiđ welcome to @socalgal 's "art"/refuge from deletion blogđ nsfw tag is #686 art tags are: #my wips #ljart transmisogynists/zionists/pedo apologists do NOT fucking follow or interact
The pathologization of anger needs to be talked about. What do you mean my therapist is telling me that thereâs something âchemically wrongâ with me because I am still angry about my mom DYING OF COVID.
of course Iâm still angry? My mom and 1.3 million other Americans are dead and you want me to shoot sunshine out of my ass about it?
âBut Itâs been 3 years since she died, you have complex griefâ yeah and she was on a ventilator for 11 days and she kept writing âI am scaredâ and âI donât want to dieâ on a notepad over and over again. While you were still going out unmasked and unvaccinated and coughing all over each other, I was living a nightmare I couldnât fucking wake up from. And every single day Iâm reminded of it in the form of âhaha wasnât the pandemic such a wacky time hahaâ and âIâm not getting a booster you canât make me đ€Ș (nobody asked)â and âitâs not real they made the numbers up!!!â
âYouâre not copingâ Ok hereâs the deal; Iâll stop feeling this anger when we have a national memorial (we donât) or a cdc equipped to stop it from happening again (we donât) or a population that takes a deadly disease seriously BEFORE it effects them personally (WE DONâT!)
until then, Iâm pretty sure my anger is A COMPLETELY NORMAL HUMAN REACTION given the facts at hand
The media blackout on Palestine coinciding with new bomb types dropped in a ceasefire tells its own story.
Nothing says "ceasefire" like a Thermobaric bomb. I guess "ceasefire" means something else down there than here... What pigs. They saw it as too hot and the temperature is too high, so they bombard us with heat generators. Damn them.
We are still being attacked so brutally and powerfully, and no one looks or stands beside us, please stop what you are doing now, stop playing, stop watching movies, stop reading, leave them even for a few minutes, and see what is happening to us. We are still bombing, killing, and the world is silent that my father's health will not last any longer if we do not provide him with treatment he will not be able to live Please, if you read my words, please don't ignore and help me even once, please
Guys I am so scared for my father his health is so difficult please help me and don't ignore me we really need your help so much please if you see this post you will share donate and help me please I'm crying from this tired life Please help me
Please I will not forgive anyone who reads this and does nothing that does not participate and does not donate if they die remember I begged you to ask for help again and again so please we have hope today please share this post and donate now please
Please guys why no one donated what should I do to donate please i need your help you you my only hope is to save my father from death please help me Donate now! We're trying to get my dad to travel with patients for treatment We are close to doing so, please donate and share this post here
Guys, time is passing and life is hard for me I am shaking for fear of losing my father Please share this post and donate 5 euros to me please you are only my hope Please donate.We are very close to reaching 15,500. Let us go.We are very close.Please share and donate.
Please guys, I am not able to stand on my feet from fear and unfortunately the bombing is still going on and life has become harder lately please if you can share this post and donate to my family please Help me and donate. I hope my parents will be evacuated as soon as possible Please donate to help him out
Please share this post and donate We are approaching more than 15,500 Please donate and share this post Please I need you and your kindness Please, please, I'm very tired, and the internet may be suddenly shut down So I hope you share my post and send me a donation please please do so Please don't ignore me
Guys, please just need âŹ247 to reach âŹ16,000 please please help us and donate to me We are very close to getting there please share this post and donate we are still suffering a lot please if you see my message please donate to me and don't ignore me please please
People on twitter are acting like Artfight is more about getting free art from big artists you like by attacking them and less about appreciating original characters (which have been relentlessly bullied by almost every community for years now) and its getting annoying so heres your reminder that you should be drawing oc designs you like and nobody is obligated to attack you or at all
quite callous how the general societal reaction to allegations of child abuse increasing in frequency seems to have been "all these millions of people are lying and faking on the internet for clout, parents are the only real protectors for children" instead of "perhaps there is something wrong structurally with how we treat children"
I urgently need $466 left for the cost of my mother's back operation
Subject : Collecting money for my mother's operation in her back
Current process :
USD 3,122 / $3,563
Vetted by @sar-soor
Vetted by @opencommunion
Vetted by @el-shab-hussein
I am raising funds to support my elderly parents who are currently living in extremely difficult condition⊠Mohammed H needs your support f
My Mother's Life Depends on Your Kindness đ
My mother is in Gaza, where every day is a struggle to survive. Some time ago, she was injured when shrapnel from nearby shelling struck her back. She tried to endure the pain for as long as she could, but now her condition has become critical.
She has now been admitted to the hospital, and her condition is very serious. She is suffering from unbearable back pain, extreme exhaustion, and every passing day brings more suffering. Watching my mother fight through this pain while I can do so little is heartbreaking.
The doctors told us that she urgently needs emergency back surgery. They warned us that the operation must be performed within the next 6 days to prevent her condition from deteriorating further.
The total cost of this life-saving surgery is $1,000.
Thanks to the incredible kindness of compassionate people, we have now raised $267 through our previous fundraising posts. We are deeply grateful to every person who has donated, shared our story, or kept my mother in their prayers.
That means we still need $441 from this appeal to complete the remaining amount needed for her surgery. We are getting closer, but time is running out, and every dollar brings my mother one step closer to the operation that could save her life.
I am begging you from the bottom of my heart: please don't scroll past my mother's suffering. Every donation, no matter how small, truly makes a difference. Even $5 or $10 can help when many kind people come together.
If you are unable to donate, please share this post with your friends, family, and community. Your share could reach someone who is able to help save my mother's life.
Please help us raise the remaining $441 within the next 6 days. My mother's condition is very serious, and she cannot wait any longer.
Thank you for your kindness, your prayers, and for standing with my family during the most difficult time of our lives â€ïž.
My children are at risk from rodents, scorpions, and highly dangerous insectsâwhich proliferate in the summer heatâas our damaged tent can no longer protect them. đ
We are suffering daily and urgently need the remaining ÂŁ1,846 to secure a safer tent, as well as food and essential supplies for our children and family. Even a donation of ÂŁ5 or ÂŁ10 can make a difference.
I stay up all night watching over my children, fearing that any poisonous insects or rodents might approach them. Just a few days ago, my son was nearly stung by a scorpion while he slept. Please donate so I can repair the tent before it's too late. Even small donations will bring us closer to safety.đđ
My grandmother could lose her life. Why is she being overlooked?đ
We have reduced our own food so we can save every possible donation for her treatment.
We have received almost no donations. The last one came three days ago.đ
My grandmother is suffering from serious kidney problems. If her treatment is delayed, she could develop kidney failure, and her body may not be able to withstand it. We are terrified of losing her.
Please, my grandmother is in a critical condition. Her chance of survival depends on the support and kindness of people willing to stand beside her.
* We need $420 every week to keep my grandmother from reaching kidney failureâa condition that could cost her her life.đđ
Please, any donation, no matter how small, helps us provide her essential treatment and gives her a chance to survive.đđ
Hildađđđđđđ
Donation link
đą Multiple vetted
â @/gazavetter â List Number #14
â @/90-ghost
â @/gaza-evacuation-funds â List Number #451
â @/Bilal-sala7 â Vetted Gaza Fundraiser List Number #20
4 days since I started sharing my grandmother's storyâŒïž
4 days without any support or donationsââ
How will my grandmother surviveâŒïžâ
đŽPlease, any donationâwhether it's $10, $15, or $20âmakes a real difference and brings us closer to providing my grandmother's treatment.đđđđđ
My friends, this is an urgent appeal. We need your support so my grandmother can stay alive.đđ
hi. im currently living in an abusive environment and its. bad. i had surgery awhile back and still have a huge wound that nearly spans into my intestines because it's taking a long time to heal and they didn't want to close me up. i had no choice but to move back here. my mom promised that she would help me with stuff while i recover but she yells at me every time i ask for help with anything and im not capable of doing any of it by myself without further injuring myself
i need help. i cant afford housing rn bc donos have been difficult and idk if i can get a caregiver but if i could at least get help with basic expenses like food and getting my phone activated and saving up for if (when lbr) i need a quick escape i would really appreciate it
love you all. sorry i keep getting into these situations - just really hard to stay stable and housed when you're severely disabled without irl support
ppal | vmo (using my friends rn, locked out of mine possibly permanently) | cshapp | kof1
I write to you with tears welling in my eyes, my body wracked with pain every second. I write to you because the ignore me and neglect I've endured hurts me more than my injuries. So remember, even if I die, I will never f0rgive anyone who ignored me and my suffering. I implore everyone to look at me and h@lp me by d0nating and sharing whatever they can.
This week, I've been battling severe pain and frequent fainting spells due to severe anemia, and I'm completely unable to afford essential medications because of their high cost. All I wish for is for these fainting spells to stop, and for me to find compassionate hearts to stand by me so I can bu.y my medication and recover quickly.
Shrapnel still lodges in my body, and the pain keeps me awake at night. What makes my suffering even worse is that I was injured when our house was bombed while we were inside. I need urgent surgery but the cost of the operation is exorbitant, and I can't afford it. Now, I can't even afford painkillers to the constant pain tearing at my body.
Please I don't want to diie, I just want to live without pain. I need your sincere sup.port to save my life and end this suffering as soon as possible. Please, I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can d0nate to me. and if you can't, I hope you will shar.e this pOst.
I am very worried about Fadel. He is suffering unendurable pain and desperately needs relief as soon as possible. Please donate to him if you have anything to spare.
It is easy to forget just how central military violence has been and remains to business as usual. More than 5 per cent of annual CO2 emissions stem from the militaries around the world. We often talk about flying and how bad it is for the climate, and it is bad, but civil aviation accounts for about 3 per cent of the total. And the 5 per cent that comes from militaries precede actual war: these are peacetime emissions, made in the process of maintaining the logistical apparatuses and fighting capacities of armies before they go to war. When they do go into battle, the fuel is set on fire and the bombs rain down in bursts of concentrated additional emissions. The US, of course, is at the centre of all this. The emissions from the occupation army during the war on Gaza might be counted as just another category of American emissions. The US outweighs every other country; indeed, as Neta C. Crawford notes, 'the US military is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world and thus the world's single largest greenhouse gas emitter In her book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, she brilliantly charts the development of what she calls 'the deep cycle' The militaries of first the UK and then the US found coal, followed by oil, to be indispensable for waging war: for manufacturing weapons, transporting soldiers into the battlefield, providing mobility once engaged, bringing firepower to bear on the enemy. By basing its operations on fossil fuels, the US military contributed to their spread throughout the economy; and when both the military and economy were thoroughly dependent on them, the protection of this essential commodity itself became an imperative of war. No part of the world has been so deeply formed and scarred by this cycle as the Middle East. Although Palestine is at its centre, the devastation clearly extends to other countries too: think only of Iraq and Yemen.
â The Destruction of Palestine is The Destruction of the Earth, Andreas Malm
The streets of Arminium were empty tonight. It was an eerie empty, an inhabited empty; an empty as if suddenly, every single person walking those streets had decided they had somewhere else to be. As if the whole city had simply left. You could feel presences that had been there, like they were in your peripheral vision, gone when your gaze sought them directly. It was the kind of empty that could only exist in a place typically inhabited, and Arminium was a place very inhabited.
Tonight though, she was a ghost town. Darkness settled on her streets, shadows laying like blankets, thick and heavy, enveloping the restaurants, trade stalls, venues, theaters, bathhouses, forums, narcotics bars, and communal housing that lined her broad, colonnaded avenues. The cityâs mass transit littered the streets, big articulated groundcars and the ubiquitous trains, trams, and maglevs that dotted any Imperial city.
The great, multi-colored hab-towers loomed high overhead, fading off into the night sky. Mazes of walkways, transit routes, and aircar lanes spanned the chasms between the towers. Those mighty buildings leered down, the only light in the city barely peering out from the forests of comms masts, sat uplinks, environmental units, radomes and sensor towers, red warning lights blinking steadily into the gloom. The lights did little to pierce the cityâs oppressive darkness, strangled by the shadows and the damp, foggy blackness.
It was through that blackness that a lone gunship descended, twin engines carving deep furrows in the wispy skin of Arminiumâs constant cloud cover. Her deep red hull blazed in the gloom, lurid and violating, the color of flesh round a foreign body or bad wound. It was not of Arminium. She traced her own descent, blinking running lights like the lure of a deep-sea predator seeking blindly in the brine. The roar of her engines reverberated between the hab-towers and the cityâs streets, echoing down its canyons, booming through its empty alleys and deserted buildings. The city spoke it back like the whisper of a crowd, thousands of echoes that could be heard loud, from all around, as if you stood in their midst, all eyes fixed on you. There was nothing else to compete with it, nothing but the half-imagined background hum of any industrial city, even one bereft of life like this.
The gunship dipped lower, angling towards the ground with its peregrine prow. It banked and darted between the towers, winding the thousands of meters down to surface level. It had been dim even at the communal levels, but down here near the city floor, it was a different world. The darkness swallowed everything, and the twin engines were nothing as it encroached. Their blaze disappeared as the gunship hauled back on its thrust, engine nacelles tilting downward to redirect the lift.
It hung like a carrion bird over the dead city, the roar of the engines muffled by the close, confined walls of the hab-tower foundations, great anchors of stone and alloy grafted into the planetâs firmament. Searchlights stabbed out from her hull, fingers of light questing out into the inky blackness, playing across one of the principal heavy-lift flight pads at the cityâs center, near to its civil support systems.
Sergeant Alicia Harkin watched those lights crawl across tarmac, fencing, and a lonely flight control tower sat at the center of four great platforms laid out like a compass. With a final groan, the gunshipâs engines cut out, and she settled onto the north pad, sinking down onto her landing shocks. She could see the world outside through the gunshipâs cameras, dotted across her hull. Alicia saw through them, studied the urban landscape stretching out inexorably into the black or vanishing back up into the shrouded heights. She tried not to see movement every time the lights crept across an overturned car or apartment balcony. It couldnât be movement.
Thatâs what the sensors also bolted onto the ship were for, and they were clear. Her training sergeant had always said you should trust your senses, but believe in the equipment. The senses were tied to your mind, and that could fail you at any time. Her mind couldnât help but picture things out there, slinking in the dark. The city couldnât be truly empty. It felt wrong, like an inversion, a mistake. A violation.
The gunship ticked and whirred as it cooled, superheated hull bleeding re-entry heat into the surrounding air. The heat leeched out of it, drawn out by the cold, hollow urbanity around it, sucked up by atmosphere and buildings so normally accustomed to the swelter-heat of mass population and human activity. The alloy hull settled in the cold, the chill creeping up her struts, worming through her plating deep into the craft. It seeped up through the gaps and the seams, slithering into her innards as the heat slowly drained away, pumped out by the last few gasps of her impulse jets cycling down. The cold settled like a pall over the craft, lying in state.
In her hold, cocooned inside meters of interweaved plating, armor mesh, and the varied layers of skin that made up her frame, Harkin and her fellow passengers sat in silence. No one wanted to be the first voice to speak in the city.
Her charge, however, seemed to have no compunction here. Her charge. Harkin scoffed, examining the Bureau of Intelligence officer again. Sheâd met them on the ride down, hadnât even known they were coming. Worse, the personnel file sheâd found was little more than black bars on blank pages. Redactions or not, non-combatants never sat well with her. Especially spooks. Spooks were bad omens. The civilian, dressed in black field fatigues and an army trooperâs helmet, rose from their crash chair, turning to dig some personal items from the overhead storage webbing. A pistol, slotted into a chest rig like reflex; a helmet-mounted video recorder, which they spent a moment bolting on. Last, one of the Bureauâs active camo shawls, cinched to the attachment points on their uniformâs shoulders, back, and chest. All of it done without looking, all of it routine.
âRight, letâs get moving, people. Last registered city plan shows about an hour transit time to the CivCent building. Should take us another half an hour to get civil defense sensors up and broadcasting.â The civvie turned, looking at Harkin and her team like theyâd only just realized other people were on the gunship. âWhat? Weâve got a city of three million people and not one of them seems to be here. Itâs taken us long enough to respond, I donât want to waste any more time just sitting here. Up and at em, troopers.â
That animated her people. The rest of the team rose, restraint harnesses tossed aside as they went through the motions of equipment check. Legion training was pretty insistent on maximizing the luxury of a non-combat insertion. No incoming fire meant you damn well better give every piece of gear a final once over.
Nine clicks on the squad comms channel told her the squad was green across the board. She turned to the civilian while her corporal ran his hands across her armor, checking seals and securing plates one last time. Being the ranking officer came with its perks, and she patched her chargeâs voice link to her private channel.
âTwo rules, sir, before we disembark. One, I donât want to have to tell the Bureau I lost an agent, so if any one of my people gives you an order, you follow it. Two, donât show me up like that again. Fog of war is gonna play hell on the teamâs nerves already, they donât need commanders sniping at each other. Outside this channel, you and me are best friends while weâre in Arminium. Beyond that, sir, weâll follow your lead. This is your field, not mine. Excited to work with you,â Alicia finished. She put a little more warmth on that last part than she really needed to.
They were all on the same side, after all. Navigating this city was going to be unpleasant enough already. No need to add internal division to the list of things she needed to watch out for. The half smile her charge flashed at her let her know the feelings were shared.
Good, she thought to herself. Weâre all professionals here. She swept her eyes across the team, lingering long enough that each of her troopers knew sheâd seen them.
As one, ten Legionaries and a single civilian walked through the yawning maw of the big gunshipâs hold. Arminiumâs frigid night swallowed them whole.
âââââââââ
Arminium gave up none of her secrets, even once the team had really stepped foot into the city. Theyâd secured the flight tower before setting out. Three of her troopers, a lone unaugmented human pilot in tow, had crossed the vast, flat asphalt of landing pad, weaving through overturned fuel trucks and overladen luggage drones, even a planetary lifter, dark and silent. The refueling hoses were still hooked up, and the gunshipâs sensors had read residual heat in the engines, as if it was in the midst of pre-flight checks.
After radioing back that the control tower was up and running, her people had linked up with the rest of the team, the pilot deposited back inside the cocoon of the gunshipâs cockpit. From there, theyâd advanced on the transit portâs ground exit, the yawning gates through which the cityâs traffic had flowed. The team had stood there a moment, on the other side of the transit lines, staring out into the gloom. The agent crossed the precipice first.
Sheâd expected the city to be silent, back on the gunship. No people, no traffic, no life at all near as the team could tell. But it was as loud as any city sheâd ever stepped foot in. Air circ, the great atmospheric systems that threaded through the towers and rooted underneath the streets. They hummed the drone of filtration, draining out the alien atmosphere of Arminiumâs world for something more breathable. Chimes, from a local CivAdmin, announcing appointment openings for commercial licenses. Down here at the bottom of the cityâs sprawl, great condensed pressure systems whispered past, muffled winds buffeting across their insulating armor plates.
The loudest sounds were the maglevs. You could hear the roar of the displaced air, winding through the great trunks of the hab-towers. The titanic trains still ran their routes from station to station. The hum of the Realm-reactors buzzed from all around, a constant sub-conscious scratching. Harkin had lived many of her years in ubiquitous metropolises like these, but it was the first time sheâd ever really heard the insect-swarm voice of a major cityâs reactor.
The whole team was hearing sounds theyâd never really noticed before. Rennock and Vuong had called in voices, before theyâd run them down to a public address system giving times for a local theater.
Their progress into the city had been filled with that, phantom noises and fluttering sensor contacts that would inevitably result in nothing. Twice, someone reported laughter, but a sweep of the city block theyâd been bounding down had scrounged up nothing. It was just too large, the city, the towers pressing down on you from above. Her troopers were filling it with noise because there should be noise here.
They were making their way through the main thoroughfares, keeping to the open to speed their progress along. The choke of vehicles slowed them at times, but what couldnât be clambered over or skirted around could be moved pretty easy by ten pairs of power armored hands- and the direction of their lone civilian. Harkin made herself stop sweeping the endless rows of apartment windows above her, watching the agent up ahead, where they forged their path ahead, ensconced between her two point troopers. The team itself was pretty spread out, at least a solid ten meters of combat separation in any direction, but sheâd rather take the chance of the escort group drawing fire clustered up. Let Legion plate soak anything incoming; it was better than letting the agent try.
She still hadnât learned the agentâs name. That wasnât necessarily unusual in her line of work, and with the number of Bureau agents who went from deep recon to foreign embed postings, it made a certain amount of sense to keep a roster of ghosts. But this one wasnât one of those embeds. Theyâd spoken very little, but she recognized a long-time operator in any field. Theyâd been sent on enough missions like these that it had become as routine for them as reloading was for her. She could do it with one hand.
It was the attitude. They walked like they belonged here, like they were part of Arminium. Where Harkin and her team jerked their heads left and right, up and down, rifles up and fingers tightened round the trigger, the agent was calm. They simply forded ahead, standing in the lee of her troopers like a hedge beneath the great boughs.
It left an uneasy feeling with her. Anything that seemed like it fit in here, down in the urban deep, was something she wanted no part of.
The rest of the group was as ideal as she could have asked. The Legions bred good people. Sheâd only just been assigned to the team a few weeks ago. Hades 1-1, a quick reaction force for the 8th Fleet, was drawn together the way all of the 8thâs spec ops was: by taking the best from the Legions, and throwing them together. They were drawn from half a dozen specializations, and only two of them- Corporal Antonin Vargas and Princeps Eion Techapsi- had served in the same unit before. But the business of a Legionary was a shared language, and the team had taken together quick. They ran together well in drills, contributed in tactical planning, and coordinated as the five-person fireteams they preferred like it was an art. If they didnât belong here in the dead city, too vital and physically present, they certainly acted like they were ready for whatever this city had to reveal.
They were making good, steady time. The path hadnât been a direct one, having to wind through the cityâs dense urban sprawl. Twice, theyâd actually nearly avoided the cityâs titanic maglevs. The trains, dozens of meters across and even more tall, had come barreling out of nowhere, shrieking at full speed along the transonic transit lines. Sheâd caught herself looking for passengers on the first one, gawking behind the faceplate of her helmet as it flew by. She knew a few of the others had, too. You just half expected it here, like a switch getting thrown. Theyâd seen nothing in the flashing lights of the passing commuter cars and the empty, yawning doors of transport cars devoid of the materials humans would have had loaded on there.
The second time it happened, her corporal sent her a comms request on his personal channel.
âSpooky shit, ainât it?â Antonin Vargas had a warm voice, husky and confident. It fit the easygoing drop trooper well, and it made him an incredible second in command. He was nice to talk to. He had sidled up to her as theyâd kept walking, the team easing up a little from the earlier jumpiness. The maglevs had gotten the spooks out of them, and they were getting more comfortable just being on the move.
âItâs not great, Toni. None of itâs great. We had what, three separate Bureau teams with us at the briefing? Hell, we all got earmarked for this from the NavInt chief,â Vargas grumbled when she mentioned the rank, âand no actual info. We didnât even know they were sending someone with us until the drop, and I donât know anything about him. Thatâs a lot of Navy Intelligence presence for no real intel beyond âgo here, do thisâ. Maâam.â They hopped the couple of meters of overturned groundcar in front of them. The further into the city they got, the more choked the streets were becoming. For the first time, they were seeing some actual disruption, some evidence of disturbance. A few crashed buses, tables and chairs scattered in front of one of the cityâs wine houses. It wasnât enough to slow the team, even the civilian, but it was making it a little bit more of an exercise.
âWell, at least they sent a decent one. Older, that one, a little more cultured. Combat cultured, if you catch my drift...â her corporal trailed off, the hint of conspiracy in his voice. Not a conspiracy at speculating where the Bureau of Intelligence agent came from- they were plenty free to do that- but to hope this one could keep up. The Bureau certainly had its enhanced people, civilians whoâd taken the genemod and cybernetic plunge. You didnât have to be a bulked out slab of hard fighting trooper like her people to take a little walk on the wild side, and every Legionary hoped to get one. Her people would walk through fire for somebody; it was just nice if that somebody could also take a little heat.
Vargasâ glimmer of hope for the agent meant a lot. He had a second nature for picking the good ones.
âSo what do you think it is, maâam,â he continued, ducking a collapsed walkway where one of the municipal drones had crashed into it. A couple of minder bots were busy attending to it, and the team could hear the rumble of one of the city repair crews. Harkin could picture the massive industrial vehicle crushing the carpet of transports, trams and conveyors left sitting on the streets. âItâs not a raid. Arminiumâs got the whole system on monitor, and it talks with the other planets in the system pretty regularly. This would have been called in, and the 8th has a fleet depot just a couple days from here. The only reason it would go two weeks no contact, and trip our protocols, is if they couldnât see it coming.â They both laughed at that- short, harsh barks. The idea itself was a joke. A modern world like this could see a whole hell of a lot of bad things coming its way, and do quite a lot about pretty much all of them. An immense amount of work had gone into a system like this.
Grav-nets and Realm-pulse sensor buoys at the edge of the systemâs limit reported on every objects entering or leaving it, and the astronavigation supercomputers in Arminium and the other population centers in the city turned raw data, flashed down to them at speeds faster than light, to build a living picture of the entire system. From the few times Harkin had done urban defense ops, sheâd had an up-close glimpse of what that looked like. Arminium saw her environment, celestial and planetary, better than any of them could ever hope to perceive their own. She had perfect clarity.
From there, civil defense options were pretty broad. A properly warned city could be made impervious to a whole host of physical impacts and weapons, and it made Frontier raiding of anything beyond an isolated town pointless. Likewise, even a populous frontier city was a minor prize to the great galactic states. It explained the lack of obvious violence. Anything that could really crack Arminium wouldnât have wasted the time to do so, and anything that couldnât would have either been intercepted by Harkinâs fleet or just left, not wanting to waste the resources.
Which, frustratingly, put the answer firmly outside of Harkinâs field. A realization which, upon reaching, she really didnât want to share with her corporal.
âIf it was as easy as guessing, we wouldnât have the Inquisitor here with us, Toni. But we wouldnât be here if they didnât think they might need a hammer. So what gets past the all-seeing eye, takes out a city, and somehow might still need a team of the meanest shitkickers the 8th has on hand?â A little extra steel on that last line, using her voice to sell bravado she couldnât really believe. Vargas, credit to him, laughed like he meant it.
She gave another silent thanks to the Legion heâd been plucked from. A good second was a resource you had to cultivate, and she knew his home unit was weaker for his detachment. Not for nothing, she noted dryly to herself, but they also didnât have to do drops into places like this. They could survive without him.
They were coming up on a bend in the road they were on. The agent and their minders were about fifty meters ahead, the rest of the team strewn about the roadway and footpaths that lined the streets. Most of the team had stowed their weapons, rifles mag-clamped to their backs or hanging from the webbing strapped and stretched across their armor like a spiderâs weave.
The agent paused. Demba, one of her point troopers, went scurrying off ahead, around the bend. The young commando disappeared, and the agentâs icon flashed on her HUD. They wanted to talk to her. Vargas saw it too, turning to shrug at her as they both broke into a brief jog to reach the front of the formation. She sent the hold signal to the rest of the team. They unlimbered the weapons theyâd just stowed, some dropping to one knee, the others scrambling for good cover.
The agent grimaced as they approached.
âSergeant, Corporal Vargas. Weâve found something.â They turned, trusting the two of them to follow. Or maybe not caring if they did. They followed the Inquisitor round the bend. Another twenty or so meters ahead, Hastatus Demba crouched next to a hab-towerâs entrance, still as death. The agent paced ahead; they werenât blessed with the kind of senses that had clued Demba in, the ones that brought Harkin and her corporal to a halt as soon as the commando came into view.
Splashed across the entrance, the unmistakable odor of it wafting in the air, was the vivid crimson of fresh blood.
Help a multiply disabled lesbian from the global south currently between jobs
I quit my soul crushing suicidality inducing job in early June. I've been looking since (and actually from even before, I'd been wanting out for years), but it's tough now where I live even for entry level positions with Kast's and Quiroz's buffoonery (in summary, we were recently VERY fucked with a new reform and I'm trying hard not to think about it much đ€Ș).
I'd appreciate help just to stay on top of my bills, please.
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